This invention relates to the field of access control for entity search. In particular, the invention relates to access control for entity search based on query semantics.
Entity search has recently attracted the attention of many researchers from a classical information retrieval (IR) perspective. This extension follows the observation that for many user queries, entities are more suitable for query satisfaction than full documents such as web-pages or scientific papers. A typical entity search scenario starts with a user query that describes an entity of interest and possibly additional constraints on the entity's relationships with other entities. The retrieval system task is then to retrieve all matching entities (or documents that mention them), ranked by their “relevance” to the user query. As an example, in a medical domain, a query like “Drug A” AND “patient” may require a search to discover medication entities that contain the term “Drug A” and which have at least one relationship with some patient entity (e.g., medications that were consumed by patients).
Many discovery systems in various domains, such as social, medical, enterprise, and customer relationship management (CRM), may benefit from exposing entity search services. Yet, many such systems may need a control on the level of information sharing during retrieval time in order to answer queries of authorized users and protect privacy. For example, in a medical domain, patients may wish to control who can search their personal health records and which portions of their data may be searchable (for example, physicians may fully search patient health records while others may search only medical data such as medical treatments for purposes of clinical trials).